Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Jesus.

It was fucked.

So was this when she first ran away?

No. There wasn’t anywhere to go yet. Besides, this was nothing new. Her mother was always “having a few people over tonight” or “going out for a little bit” even back in Missoula. Even before her father left. The both of them sometimes. Her father carrying her from the couch where she’d fallen asleep. His tobacco whiskey whiskers, good night Applesauce.

Did she miss him?

Of course. But not exactly. Everybody wants freedom.

Meaning?

Meaning she sneaks a bottle of vodka to school.

For what?

To make friends. She wants to be grown. She wants to have a few people over too. She wants to go out for a little bit.

Did she make friends?

In the grove of live oaks between her school and her house. There was a place where kids went to smoke, listen to music, and make out.

And what did these kids make of this tiny thing only on the cusp of fourteen and walking up with a handle half-full of vodka?

They asked her what did she have there. She said, does anyone have a cigarette, I’d kill for a cigarette right now.

All maturelike. Had she even ever smoked before?

A couple times. Lori and Kim smoked back in Montana. She used to sneak them some of her mother’s cigarettes. It’s how she made friends with them too. She pulled on the vodka and passed it to a boy who lit a cigarette and gave it to her.

Did Rachel like that?

Rose.

Did Rose like that?

Like what?

The boy giving her the cigarette?

She loved it.

Ascant shadow dressing in the dark, thin arms, narrow chest, tugging his shirt over his head against a brown moon hung low outside his window. He ceases his dressing to listen, his silhouette turning to, halting, turning fro. Nothing. Cecil bends. Pulls shoelaces through the eyeholes, doubleknots them.

He pads over to the light switch but doesn’t turn it on. Produces a small tool from his pocket. Flat head in the flat head screw on the switch panel. The screws fall into his hand, into his pocket. He removes the plate, removes a twenty-dollar bill folded and pressed into the box with the wires. He slips the bill neatly in his shirt pocket and replaces the light-switch plate.

He slides open the window, removes the screen from the frame with practiced ease.

The dog in the yard stands, wags what should be a tail. She made Uncle Elliot have the animal’s cords cut. His balls too. Would like to do a little work on her with a knife. Stack her own damn firewood.

He moves Indian-quiet through the yard to the outbuilding, the dog padding along, her chain dragging to its limit, whereupon she leaps making that awful airy bark, that rude longing aspiration. The outbuilding. The tarp. The under it. The old single-speed Huffy. Tires he patched himself on the sly.

He pedals down the drive crunching over the gravel to the gate. Bike over gate, Cecil over gate, Cecil back onto bike. Stark cyclist gliding on the blacktop, the countryside of tilted fence posts and barbed wire and small bitter wind. He is cold and nearly miserable.

Pedal. You’ll warm up.

Shelby itself is still, yellow lights ablink at the intersections. You couldn’t be farther from anywhere. He wheels in behind the Hi-Line Bar to ditch the bike. Blows his hands, pacing. A cur wanders by startled to see him, growls, cuts a wide path. He shakes stones in hands like dice, pitches them at the railroad tracks. He walks the ties, he walks the fishplates.

Two hours, the pink surge of dawn.

He hazards out to the street. Dude’d said meet him in back, but maybe… No.

His ride is not coming.

He sets awhile in the South of the Border, idly mincing his eggs with his fork.

They’ve told you to rise and shine by now, idiot. You could go back. Say you’d taken a bike ride. No. Rather they’d drag you out of here than ride back there under your own power.

A Blackfoot Indian comes in, orders a coffee and a donut to go. Rancher by the look of him. Brown denim jacket. Cowboy hat, beaded hatband.

Go.

Cecil follows him out.

He asks the man is he going west. The sun in his eyes from the dusty shop window opposite. He shields them to see the Indian’s face the texture of pitted wax, looking at him out the open door of his Ford. He shields them from showing his fear. The Indian scarcely nods. But nod he does. Cecil hops to.

A whole day to just get from Cut Bank to Kalispell. A buffet lunch he can neither really afford nor resist. A box of saltines.

Where did all your money go, you should have more.

Someone shortchanged you, stupid.

He skulks, a black bogeyman at night in the Kalispell alleyways behind the old railroaders' cottages, walking to stay warm, running from barking dogs. He sits in a coin-op laundry for as long as feels safe. Catches a southbound Kenworth.

“You got the fidgets,” logger says.

“I’m all right.” He stiffens, deepens his voice. “M’aright.”

He walks to the rail yard in Missoula. See him dashing out after the departing train at sunset, slipping off the low rung, tumbling. He lies there, everything inside him rattling around, settling. Agony all over. He pushes himself up by the palms on the sharp white stones. A swollen pulsating lip. He checks to see that he has all his loosened teeth. His goddamn hair hurts.

“The fuck are you doing.”

He sits on the ties, sobs.

“Do you even know.”

“Quit being sorry for yourself. Get up.”

He finds the bums on Jacob’s Island the way an eight ball finds its pocket. Jackpot or scratched the game, he can’t tell. He gets fed, a tarp to lay on or under, up to him. Wonders what this foretells, is shit lookin up for once.

He sits cross-legged with the tarp gathered and crinkling around him every time he moves, and tells lies to the men here. There’s a cackling and breaking of bottles in the near distance and the sound of water as he falls asleep.

He wakes though it seems like he never slept at all. A dust of hoar on the tarp over him, the stalks of grass like blown milky glass. Steam issues from the dirty granite visages of the men around, their bloodshot eyes like molten rock.

He volunteers that he needs to pee. He never goes back.

He paces the grocery store unable to get warm, buys eight ounces of Colby cheese from a skeptical clerk, and realizes outside that he has no way to cut it. He peels away the plastic walking into the downtown gnawing it like a banana.

In the Army Navy store he looks at the garments with an admiration bordering on lust. The puffed ski jackets and the heavy canvas army coats with fur hoods. Wool gloves with leather mittens that fold over. Everything out of his range. He counts his money to be sure.

“How much for these blankets?” he asks.

The clerk folds closed his paper and comes out from behind the counter and takes the blanket from him, and then moves a blanket in the bin aside to show him the sign.

“Ten dollars?”

“How about that? He can read.”

Businesspeople and day shoppers on the sidewalks. He searches their faces like a stray cat mewling at the window. Nothing comes of it, the pleading in his face. He could cry.

He passes a blond girl on the sidewalk, busking with a bamboo pan flute. Something to consider, this.

An hour later, he is across the street next to the Army Navy store tapping out rhythms with sticks on the side of a bucket. A discarded shoe box in front him. She’s watching him from the first moment he sets to pounding. An hour of mounting discouragement. She rises, looks both ways, and crosses the middle of the street straight for him, a hand to her belly.